Amanda Murphy > Amanda's Quotes

“When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

“Richard did not believe in angels, he never had. He was damned if he was going to start now. Still, it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they're scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too. ”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up forever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.'
'They kill themselves, you mean?' said Bod. [...]
'Indeed.'
'Does it work? Are they happier dead?'
'Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”
― Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don't look like much of a minstrel, and you're— pardon me for saying so lad, but it's true— ordinary as cheese crumbs. So it's love if you ask me.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the bed we wake up in in the morning and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

“Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is that she has made of my life.”
― Neil Gaiman, Snow, Glass, Apples

“Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“I believe [...] that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“A flash of resentment. It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having...if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn't fair. "Life's not fair," said Ginnie, as if I had spoken aloud.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.”
― Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants

“I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and they end eventually. I wake up.
The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

“There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“The World

"You know the saddest thing," she said. "The saddest thing is that we're you."
I said nothing.
"In your fantasies," she said, "my people are just like you. Only better. We don't die or age or suffer from pain or cold or thirst. We're snappier dressers. We possess the wisdom of the ages. And if we crave blood, well, it is no more than the way you people crave food or affection or sunlight - and besides, it gets us out of the house. Crypt. Coffin. Whatever."
"And the truth is?" I ask her.
"We're you," she said. "We're you with all your fuckups and all the things that make you human - all your fears and lonelinesses and confusions... none of that gets better.
"But we're colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything..." And then she stopped.
"Are you crying?" I asked.
"We don't cry," she told me. Like I said, the woman was a liar."

Fifteen Painted Cards From A Vampire Tarot”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Endless Nights

“If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“Love belongs to Desire. And Desire is always Cruel. -Old Man”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House

“So you used to know everything?"
She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play."
"To play what?"
"This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Some things may change," said Wednesday, abruptly. "People, however... People stay the same.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“We save our lives in such unlikely ways.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head?

Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming.

Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones